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Topic: Picking Cain's Brains (Read 23337 times)

I'll be honest and admit ignorance on the true capabilities of all three types, I was assuming there would have been advances on bio/chem simply due to how long they had been around. These could also play more into guerilla tactics which I would imagine Iran to come down to.

Still, lots more to research and read up on, many thanks.

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Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Maybe, possibly, though I think Klein kinda tried to hard to make a "thing" out of something that is a universal human instinct - use a crisis to pass your own agenda. I mean, that is pretty obvious. And the desire to go back to a blank slate and rebuild everything from scratch is also pretty universal too - recall the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero.

Maybe, possibly, though I think Klein kinda tried to hard to make a "thing" out of something that is a universal human instinct - use a crisis to pass your own agenda. I mean, that is pretty obvious. And the desire to go back to a blank slate and rebuild everything from scratch is also pretty universal too - recall the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero.

Thank you!

Seeing the footage of Thatcher chumming around with Pinochet coupled with police beating the shit out of miners in the early 80s pinged childhood memories.

I was glad to see this film because I am entirely ignorant of economics and didn't know anything about Milton 'Uncle Miltie' Friedman. Kind of weird to read about him. On one hand I was like "oh...he advocated a voluntary military" and yet he believed that all medical licenses should be abolished. (perhaps he should've signed a pention?)

I occasionally try to figure out for myself whether I am for or against some sort of united Earth government (probably in the form of a confederacy or a beefed up UN). Sometimes I ham up support for it in order to troll people who think that the Rapture is imminent. If you have the time, could you make an argument for and against such a union? Obviously lack of war is a pro, and improbability of agreeing to any sort of unified policy on any subject a con (....or a pro....). I imagine that at the end of weighing everything, it's probably more trouble than it is worth and that it ends up being utopian balderdash, but I'm wondering if there would be a good reason(s) and a good method(s) of building up to some sort of planetary unity. And obviously there's the problem with getting the Christians on board without sending them to death camps, which only proves them right, and as such can't happen because we can't have them be right about the NWO.

I don't see any good reasons to believe that global governance is necessary or desirable. On the other hand, the only reason I can see it being worse than currently existing governments is that would have much more power.

My view of states is fairly cynical. While there may be historical reasons why Belgium, for example, is a more valid nation-state than SouthDutchandFrenchistan, that doesn't invalidate my view that all government, unless you live in a city-state, is a bunch of people living far away from you, deciding to do lots of things and then saddling you with a bill. My personal opinion, rootless cosmopolitan that I am, is that being ruled from London is no different than being ruled from Brussels (or Washington) in the grand scheme of things. As such, being ruled by the United Federation of Planets, out of San Francisco (or, more likely, Geneva) wouldn't make a huge change in my opinion. It would be a bunch of people, far away, delivering goods and services, some of questionable utility, others fairly useful, and charging me for them all. Meh.

I would also posit that there is no reason to believe global government would bring about the end of war. China was One Empire Under Heaven, yet was plagued by all kinds of civil wars, secessionist movements headed by rogue warlords, peasant uprisings, fanatical cults and insurgencies. Europe was the same - in theory, it was Christendom, under the rule of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, but the Byzantines and French tested that proposition and came away with rather different conclusions. The Pope's blessing was required to be seen as a legitimate ruler, and often the Pope would revoke that blessing - going as far as to excommunicate entire country's of people. And of course, there were the wars of dynastic succession and so on, battling for relative power and prestige within the confines of the existing system.

The other major issues would be that of culture and religion, and on what grounds would world government procede? A lot of assumptions are that world government would be necessarily western in outlook - liberal, respectful of human rights, involve devolved power and multiple branches of government, secular.

But Westerners only make up a fraction of the world population. A democratic world government would have to accomodate the wishes of a billion Muslims, many of whom are insistent on trying out this Shariah Law thing they keep reading about. It would have to contend with 1.3 billion Chinese - who even if they were not under the rule of the Communist Party, would still be heavily informed by a strong history of Confucian legalism. And then there is nearly a billion Indians - many of whom are, of course Hindu. Not forgetting the nearly two billion Christians - many from places like Uganda. Already we're looking at a world where being homosexual would be very dangerous.

Without the withering away of these religious impulses and some kind of convergence on Western social and ethical norms (which, unlike certain people, I do not consider inevitable or irreversible), you can either have democratic global government, or you can have liberal global government, but you cannot have both.

As for regional bodies...they're mostly range between "ineffectual but harmless" (ASEAN) and "somewhat useful" (ECOWAS). The main problem is that a lot of them seem to look to the EU for guidance, and the EU is, to put it mildly, not good at the whole democracy thing. Still, regionalism as a general approach makes sense. It allows for easier coordination of international issues, disease, smuggling, terrorism etc, usually they have a shared history and culture, so the barriers to cooperation are low, and when problems do arise they are the closest and most knowledgeable people about them, and best suited to consider a response.

Another thing--although already somewhat implied in Cain's answer--is that running a useful and just government that benefits the people under it seems like a pretty damn hard job already. And the bigger, or rather the more complex the thing your governing, the harder I expect it to become.

You'd need to have a group of hyper-geniuses to run a world government, I'm afraid.

And who trusts a bunch of people that are 100x smarter than you? [seriously if they're significantly smarter, they're harder to identify with, and therefore harder to accept as leaders--at least, I'd think so, even if I'd know better]

Maybe if we'd clone Cain 50 times, and shake them a littlebit for variety (to avoid local minima in problem solving) and of course tweak them so they'd actually agree to do the task (not sure if our Cain would want the job, namely).

Another thing--although already somewhat implied in Cain's answer--is that running a useful and just government that benefits the people under it seems like a pretty damn hard job already. And the bigger, or rather the more complex the thing your governing, the harder I expect it to become.

You'd need to have a group of hyper-geniuses to run a world government, I'm afraid.

And who trusts a bunch of people that are 100x smarter than you? [seriously if they're significantly smarter, they're harder to identify with, and therefore harder to accept as leaders--at least, I'd think so, even if I'd know better]

Maybe if we'd clone Cain 50 times, and shake them a littlebit for variety (to avoid local minima in problem solving) and of course tweak them so they'd actually agree to do the task (not sure if our Cain would want the job, namely).

For the moment I have an image of you in a Cain factory picking Cains off of the conveyor belt and shaking them a few times and making notes on your clipboard.

Made even funnier by the fact that I have no idea what Cain looks like.

Another thing--although already somewhat implied in Cain's answer--is that running a useful and just government that benefits the people under it seems like a pretty damn hard job already. And the bigger, or rather the more complex the thing your governing, the harder I expect it to become.

You'd need to have a group of hyper-geniuses to run a world government, I'm afraid.

And who trusts a bunch of people that are 100x smarter than you? [seriously if they're significantly smarter, they're harder to identify with, and therefore harder to accept as leaders--at least, I'd think so, even if I'd know better]

Maybe if we'd clone Cain 50 times, and shake them a littlebit for variety (to avoid local minima in problem solving) and of course tweak them so they'd actually agree to do the task (not sure if our Cain would want the job, namely).

For the moment I have an image of you in a Cain factory picking Cains off of the conveyor belt and shaking them a few times and making notes on your clipboard.

Made even funnier by the fact that I have no idea what Cain looks like.

Got another question for you. Why are Socialists and Communists so long winded?

You have Chavez, whose doctor told him to stop talking so much for his laryngeal healthYou had Castro who was almost as badYou had Guevarra who would go on long tirades and then shoot you in the head...

I'm sure I'm missing a whole ton more, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of personality trait that makes one both a Leftist and a verbose bastard.

You ever read Marx? By German standards of writers, he is relatively good. But those standards include Kant and Hegel. "Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat" is a relatively succint phrase and understood concept, compared to "But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself."